Memories about Dumitru Bordeianu

Mitică Bordeianu was a different kind of man. He was small in stature, with a long moustache like a eunuch, and as talkative as one of Creangă and Sadoveanu’s Moldavians. Slowly, slowly, he got into the conversation and filled our days with his stories. He was older than his brother-in-law (because that’s what Mircea called himself), although they had been classmates at university. The reason for having started the school with a delay was the war. Mitica had completed seven years of primary school and then went to secondary school.

As the deferment of studies was only granted for the 7th and 8th grades (the last two in high school at that time), they took him to the army and went as a soldier all the way to the Don’s Neck. And what a beautiful story he told, not like other ex-combatants who would bore you to death with geographic details, describing you the whole route he had travelled. Mitica told only human episodes, in which the man was only human. And now, more than 40 years later, I remember what he went through as if I had lived it. How in that retreat, in his flight from the Thunder Ridge, he crawled home across the frozen and endless expanses of Ukraine. That year had brought a harsh winter, the like of which had not been seen for a long time. Hungry and tired, he met another soldier who was also heading for the countryside. He could see that the soldier was carrying a full sack of goods and suspected that he was carrying bread. He was taller and more stocky, and Mitica walked behind him, supposedly to cut through the icy wind more easily. And he walked and walked until he managed to untie his sack and pull out one of the two loaves. Hunger and the desire to survive made him trample on the fellowship, but he was afraid to ask the other, for he also wanted to survive and might not have given it to him. So he chose the first, unjust way. In the first village they parted, the soldier not noticing the lack of bread until then. Then he rejoined another soldier and they continued their journey towards the setting sun, across the frozen and treacherous steppe. No map, no compass, alone in the white expanse, they reached another village at night. Where to find food? They stopped at a larger building, the school.

One of them went in silently, then came out and told the other to come in, because there were soldiers sleeping on the floor. When daylight came, they also froze, but out of fear, like the frozen and dead soldier next to them. The room was full of frozen bodies of dead soldiers, stacked like piles of wood in a warehouse. Only one, the one they had groped in the dark, was not stacked in the pile, leading them to believe that our people were sleeping inside. They were asleep, poor things, for the others, in their hasty retreat, could not bury them, for the ground was frozen deep and no pits could be dug until the spring thaw. Arriving near the country, he slept with an old Russian woman, as old as his mother at home. She also had a son who had gone to war, but with the Russians. As the partisans approached the village, the old woman led him along the quiet paths to the edge of the village and showed him the way home. Mitica kissed the old woman’s hand with the respect of a son, and the old woman, the mother of the enemy soldier, wept, perhaps thinking of her child, perhaps of the soldier’s mother, whose eyes she had followed for so long. Two enemies…

In the spring of 1944, as so often in our troubled history, the Moldavians fled from the Russians, from their homes. Especially the young. Mitică found shelter with his family in a village in Olt. Having escaped from the army for a while, I don’t remember why, he became a servant at a nobleman’s court to earn a living. There was another boy in the court with him. He was a little more shy. Since the field was full of creatures and they only ate porridge and soup, he called him “Hâtrul”:

– You’ll see, Mitică, what kind of meat we’ll eat.

And without hesitation, he gives bread dipped in brandy to one bird of the flock. The turkey ate and got drunk, then it bowed down as if it were ill. He showed it to the cook and she ran to the mistress, the landlord’s mother:

– You know, madam, I think the animals are getting ill.

And she told her to kill it before the plague spread. The next day another bird got drunk. Then a few turkeys, a few fat chickens, a few geese, until the landlords were sick of all the poultry and the meat was enough for the servants. Miticăă accepted such a job, willingly, but more out of necessity. The young squire, who had also come to the estate, had a young squire in the neighbouring village whom he loved. In the evening, he would have the shepherd, Mitică, harness the horses to the phaeton and take him to his love. Then he’d ride them across the fields until late at night. They made love and the servant rode the horses. When we were there during Holy Week, my friend was full of nostalgia for the people of the village, remembering the preparations that Moldavians made for Easter. He told us, the two locals in his cell, how to make the famous and delicious Moldavian panettone. When he arrived with the recipe to knead it, he got excited, as if out of breath, and said: “You knead it, doctor, you knead it, you knead it, do you understand? and he kneaded it again, in a louder and louder voice, so that the neighbours could hear him through the open window. When we met them, they asked us:

– Hey, what kind of panettones did Bordeianu make at Easter that made our mouths water? Especially him, poor thing, because Easter was coming.

(Ioan Munteanu, La pas prin “reeducările” de Pitești, Gherla e Aiud ou Ridică-te Gheorghe, ridică-te Ioane, Majadahonda Publishing House, Bucharest, 1997, pp. 77-79)